#1402: Using VR to Pursue a Career in Filmmaking & Overcome Social Anxiety with Ariel Emerald

Ariel Emerald is a VR filmmaker who has had a short film titled Ulterior Motives and music video screen titled Like Crazy at Raindance Immersive for the past two years. Before getting into social VR, she suffered from social anxiety and isolation, and didn’t have the resources to pursue a career in film. But getting into virtual reality via VRChat allowed her to overcome social anxiety, discover the virtual clubbing scene, cultivate a friendship network, develop her cinematography and color grading skills, write and direct a range of different fiction and non-fiction pieces shot within VR, and and bring the community of VR filmmakers together with the Filmmakers of VRChat Discord.

I had a chance to catch up Ariel to talk about her journey into VR by overcoming social anxiety, and the latest in her pursuit of a career in filmmaking via VR. We also cover some of the history of filmmaking in VR starting with VRChat user hirabiki’s VRCLens that had a VRCLens Sample world that first launched on August 25, 2020 and was initially available on Booth, but now is exclusively available on Gumroad. We cover other turning points like Metacosm Studios, Joe Hunting’s on We Met in Virtual Reality” premiere at Sundance on January 21, 2022, VRCon Film Fest 2022 on December 17, 2022, Phia Bunny’s The Virtual Reality Show Film Fest on February 25, 2023, the founding of the Filmmakers of VRChat community and Discord soon afterwards, and then a selection of films shot in VR at both Raindance Immersive 2023 and Raindance Immersive 2024.

Filmmaking in VR is still in it’s very early phases in exploring non-fiction and documentary forms, replicating existing fiction genres, and then eventually pushing forward new genres of storytelling that will be made possible by the affordances of VR, breaking down geographic access to performers around the world, and having thousands and eventually millions of easily accessible virtual film sets on social VR platforms like VRChat. It’s very exciting to see where it’ll all go. Ariel Emerald’s gives me a glimpse of what’s possible when all of these virtual and human resources come together within VR to push at these edges of genre, cultivation of moods and feelings with virtual architecture, and explore new possibilities in storytelling.

EDIT: August 20, 2024. Here’s a director’s reel that Ariel just posted.

This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.

Music: Fatality

Rough Transcript

[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So in today's episode, we're going to be digging into the phenomena of making films within the context of virtual reality. Specifically, we'll be talking to Ariel Emerald, who has directed a couple of short films, one called Ulterior Motives that showed as a part of the short film competition last year at Rain Dance Immersive. And this year has a new music video that she wrote and directed called Like Crazy in collaboration with TFM Johnny and Lydian Melody. Ariel also was one of the co-founders of the filmmakers of VRChat Discord, where they've gathered lots of different folks who are using virtual reality as a medium to make films. In Ariel's case, she didn't have a lot of resources. She was suffering from a lot of social anxiety, but she still wanted to pursue a career in filmmaking. And virtual reality has opened up all these new possibilities and realms for her to be connected to other people, to collaborate, and to start actually making films within the context of VR, but also develop her cinematography and directing skills in physical reality as well. So we talk about her journey of overcoming her social anxiety through the context of VR, as well as using virtual reality as a medium to capture these stories that are ultimately being edited down into these films. Before we start to dive into today's conversation, I highly recommend checking out Ariel's music video of like crazy. It's just four and a half minutes long and I'll put a link within the show notes. And also I'd recommend checking out either beforehand or afterwards. The short film ulterior motives that really dives into this experience of overcoming social anxiety within the context of VR chat and features in the background, a lot of what's happening within the VR chat clubbing scene. So it manages to capture lots of aspects of virtual culture that I think are just super fascinating. So that's what we're coming on today's episode of the voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Ariel happened on Wednesday, July 10th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.

[00:02:11.238] Ariel Emerald: How's it going? I'm Ariel Emerald. I'm a VR filmmaker. I made a few different short films as well as a variety of other video content in the VR space, primarily in VR chat, but I have actually dipped my toe into other VR platforms as well a little bit. And I have basically come to be known as one of the people that's really pioneering in this space in terms of the VR filmmaking. And I'm close friends with all the other people in this community that are really pushing boundaries. And it's really exciting to see what we have going on here in VR filmmaking, because I really just love the freedom of being able to utilize all the resources that we have here in VR to create films of various different scales and ideas and concepts on a little to no budget because of just the resources we have. I think it's an incredible tool for filmmaking and it's really enabled me to pursue my passion. And that's why I'm here. That's why I'm in VR.

[00:03:11.345] Kent Bye: Nice. And maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into VR.

[00:03:15.667] Ariel Emerald: Absolutely. So I live on the East coast of the United States and I've been very socially isolated for much of my life. After school, I kind of sort of fell out in touch with people and I didn't really have a whole lot of friends around. I always had this big dream of making movies, but I never really had any way to conceive of myself actually pursuing that dream because I just didn't have the resources. The most important resource in filmmaking is people. I just didn't have that around because I just always had a lot of social anxiety. I didn't keep a lot of connections around me at that time. It kind of reached a real low point where I just didn't feel that my life was progressing. It was around that time that I acquired a VR headset. I acquired an Oculus Rift S and eventually I just, I was like, I've heard about this thing, VR chat. I know people come into VR chat and talk with each other and I have no idea much about it, but I mean, it could be a way for me to try to get over this social anxiety or whatnot. And, you know, maybe there's some interesting like idea of making a movie there or something like that. So I eventually loaded it up When I tell you, when I started VRChat, my social anxiety was so strong that I could not speak to anybody. I remember joining a world at one point and when I first got started and the first time I ever saw another person in a VRChat world, that person came up to me in the world, I just immediately closed the game because that was how strong my social anxiety was. The next day, I found my group of friends that became my close friends that are still my close friends to this day. From then on, I just have grown so much in this platform. I've just grown really my identity, my personality, my artistic success in this virtual world. It was really about a year before I was really able to create because there was just a lot of personal issues that I had to work through that being social in this space allowed me to work through. But after that first year, I basically sat down with a friend of mine, one of my friends that I met that first day of VRChat. And we talked about how I want to make movies. And we talked about an idea, a race film idea. And then we went out and we made that film. And that was my first short film rematch. And that short film, actually, we put it out there. We didn't expect much, but that short film ended up being shown at the VRCon Film Festival and also at Fia Bunny's TVRS Film Festival. You know, if your viewers are not familiar, she runs the virtual reality show YouTube channel, and she's quite well known. And so she had this film festival, and that's the point where things really took off, because at that point, I started to get together this film community and bring it together as something... you know, cohesive, which it was not before. I was the creator of the VR Filmmakers Discord, and I started that and started running that with my friends Konga Luwu and Gab Jenkins. And then I began work on my next short film, Ulterior Motives, which was released in July 2023. And then Raindance came on the horizon and I was able to show Ulterior Motives at Raindance 2023. And then we've just concluded Raindance 2024, where I entered my most recent project as well, a music video with TFM Johnny. That's kind of my story. I mean, there's a million thousand different journeys and stories to tell about my time in VR. I mean, it's really been the thing that reshaped my life. It's been the thing that changed everything about what I thought I was capable of as a person. And I can't even begin to describe how grateful I am that I set foot into VR that day.

[00:07:02.028] Kent Bye: Nice. Okay. Well, that gives a nice broad overview of your journey into VR. And when I look back at your YouTube page that you've posted a lot of your videos, New Year's Eve of 2022 is actually one of your first films that you were shooting inside of VR before Rematch. And so it sounds like that time sometime in the fall, maybe 2021 up to that point, maybe you could just take me back to the very early beginnings when you start to first come into VRChat, because I know there's public worlds in VRChat.

[00:07:27.645] Ariel Emerald: Of course. Yeah.

[00:07:28.786] Kent Bye: the whole like private world and events and kind of a whole other scene to really get connected into networks of people that are hanging out. So maybe take me back to, you know, how you started to enter into finding your scene in your community within the context of VRChat.

[00:07:43.873] Ariel Emerald: Yeah, and that's so important because that's not such an easy thing to do, especially I think a lot of people come in, they end up in public worlds and public worlds are known to be just hell, you know, in terms of just the mass humanity and all of its chaotic nature. appearance that it has there in public worlds but i kind of skipped that part i kind of got settled in with a really good solid group of friends right from the beginning a group called the vr punks and the vr punks they are a group of punk music enthusiasts as well as just punk culture ska culture that kind of thing and that was something completely unfamiliar to me at that time but i met this group of people they just as soon as i walked in this room they I feel like I get these premonitions sometimes, like if I see someone and I get this premonition, like, oh, I'm going to get to know that person really well. I walked into this room and I just saw these cool people sitting in the corner. I just immediately had this feeling like I'm going to become good friends with these people. So I was too socially anxious to really start, but I just kind of sat there for like a solid 45 minutes and didn't say anything. And then eventually I got sort of worked into their conversation. And before you know it, I'd spent a 12-hour night in VRChat hanging out with these people. I never expected I would do anything like that. And so I spent a lot of time hanging out with this group. And then there was another group that I spent a lot of time hanging out with. And one thing I had heard about VRChat from before I actually started playing it was I'd heard about the club scene and the rave scene in VRChat. And I'd always wanted to go to those kinds of clubs. And I really, really enjoyed dance music and that kind of culture. But I'd never really been able to take part in it because It's just kind of far away and difficult to do when you have the kind of social ineptitudes that I had at that point. But I had heard about that in VRChat. So that was one goal that I developed very quickly was to seek that out and find this club scene. And it was a bit harder to find back in the day than it is now. You had to kind of know someone who knows someone in order to get in. But I mean, nowadays you can go to the VRChat groups and you can search up shelter or loner or heist or any of those clubs. But it was a little bit harder to do back in the day. And I had to sort of find people who knew about it and be sort of introduced to that whole thing. But the first times that I went to clubs... I remember those nights very distinctly. And I remember my first sort of days going to those rave events. And it's crazy to think back on that time and just see all the DJs and see all of the organizers and all the cool people and starting to get to know their usernames. But then looking back on that, and now many of those people have become my friends or people that I've worked with or connected with in some way. But at that time, it was all so new to me. I felt so... I was learning how not to be an outcast. I was learning how not to be a social outcast. And there was a couple of groups that helped me learn a lot about all of that. And a couple just friends that I made along the way that helped me get connected to more people. And yeah, I mean, from the very start, I was thinking like, where can I find filmmaking opportunities here? Like, is there some way that I can... tell a story about this place with my camera. And I kind of eventually just got into it. And that New Year's Eve video that you mentioned, that's my first video that I ever actually filmed in VRChat. It was the first time I ever hit record with my camera in VRChat. And it was pretty shortly after that, I think, that I built a new computer, which enabled me to have more processing power. Because I started out on a laptop. I was on a 1060 graphics card laptop. And then shortly after that, I built a new computer. And then I actually started taking commission work. right away, which is crazy because somebody found that video on my YouTube channel and said, this is pretty good. I'd love to pay you to make some videos. And I don't know, kind of took off from there. I made a lot of videos in the club scene and that helped me gain some connections, which helped me when I eventually made ulterior motives and all of that. But yeah, I think the biggest aspect about getting into VRChat is that you just kind of have to sort of find people to like get you into the sort of Like, cause you're going to just drown in the public world scene. That's just not, I don't know. Some people make their way in there and then, you know, find their people there, but like, you just kind of, I don't know. I'm really grateful that I found such a good group of friends straight away because that gave me a home for me to exist in and to learn so much more about myself and how to be social with those friends and all of that.

[00:12:28.359] Kent Bye: Yeah. And the ulterior motives, the main character, and that seems very similar to your own autobiographical journey into VR with this social anxiety, but also, you know, entering into the club scene. Maybe you could just talk about that story of that. And if there was things that were touching into your own experiences within VRChat.

[00:12:47.296] Ariel Emerald: Right. Yeah, I would say it's not something I'm really trying to hide. The fact that the character in Ulterior Motives is pretty heavily based on my own experiences in VRChat. I think that one of the motivations behind making that film was I just had this sense of there are things that I need to express, emotions and ideas that I need to express that I can't really just tell you. I can't really just explain to you with words how this feels. I have to show you. I have to express this through a medium which will enable you to see and feel and experience these emotions. And that was my primary goal behind creating Ulterior Motives. And yeah, I think that character in that is somewhat representative of a version of me that used to exist, which was just largely disconnected. I mean, that... kind of connects with a later VRChat sort of me, because when I first got into the club scene, it was very, very exciting. I had a couple of friends that were like, we were getting into the scene together. You know, one of my good friends, one of my best friends, Sushi Ferret, We went to our first sort of club together and then she ended up becoming a really, really well-known DJ and she performs all the time and she has a lot of friends over in the Shelter community. But at that time we were both newcomers to it and we both got into the club scene together. And then I had some other friends that were interested in Shelter and Loner and other places like that. Loner was very big back then. I made a lot of memories at Loner, but it was just kind of this, like, we were the outsiders. We were the newbies coming into this new space that we didn't know anybody and just existing, just experiencing, having a good time. And I almost feel like there's aspects of that time that were better and more exciting than afterwards, because then suddenly you start to get to know people and then the social aspect starts to weigh very heavy on you, or at least it did on me as I started to get more excited developed in the club scene, start to make more connections, you know, the weight of social connection and the weight of just like still continuing to feel this sense of being an outcast and, and the, you know, there was a time in my life where a lot of loneliness really built up and it wasn't something I could escape because my Primary form of leisure was to exist in social spaces in VR where I would still feel like an outcast and still feel lonely. And that's really the time in my life that influenced Ulterior Motives and influenced me to write about my experiences and put them into that film.

[00:15:18.288] Kent Bye: Yeah, I really love that piece in the way that it is a narrative fiction piece, but it also has this documentary feel to it because you are actually sort of embedding yourself into these live events. And the great thing about VR is that you can tune down the world volume and other voices and kind of have your own experience of whatever is happening. And so you're able to craft your own narrative within the context of these events that are happening. So it felt very of the moment of what was happening in VRChat. So documenting the sort of surrounding stuff, but also having the ability to do your own thing with, you know, create any event as your own set to be able to tell these stories. And yeah, and also a lot of the documentaries on the clubbing scene really focus on, I guess, more of the external objective aspects of the scenes and the clubs. But this was much more what was the experience like of a direct phenomenological experience of just trying to feel connection and the experience of trying to have your friends, but their own private instances, or, you know, just kind of trying to find your connection to either your existing community or to have actual authentic connection. And so I thought it was just a really beautiful capturing of how that kind of universal experience gets translated in the context of VR.

[00:16:33.556] Ariel Emerald: right yeah absolutely i mean there's this really great documentary about the club scene which i highly recommend to anybody interested which is made by resonant advisor which goes over in great detail the club scene and some of its most you know creatively motivated spaces which is really positive you know there's so much positivity in vr chat i feel and it's really beautiful to see just people creators pushing their limits making stuff that's new and original and really out there but at the same time It's not all sunshine and rainbows. And there's very much a lot of, VRChat is a parallel reality. It has all of the same things that we have in our reality. It has all of the same joy. It has a lot of joy because it's a great space to build joy, but it's also got pain. It's also got a lot of emotional pain. loneliness. I don't think VR chat is the problem. I mean, you'll see some people out there say that, oh, VR chat makes you lonely. It makes you a social loser because you're just in the VR headset all the day, all the time. And I feel like that's a very uninformed perspective. I don't think VR chat is to blame for people's, you know, mental health issues that they experience, but there is still that pain. There is still that darkness. And I felt like I wanted to shine a light on that a little bit with ulterior motives particularly because i wasn't in such a good place myself at the time but yeah i mean it's like i said there's so much good and so much bad in this world it's just everything all of humanity is here but It happens to be a very, very, very good space to create. And that's what makes it so special, I think. And so I've heard people describe VRChat as existing within the art of your friends. Like you're living in your friend's art because it's just everything you see is designed and created by some artists. And it's really beautiful. But, you know, it's just raw humanity. Everybody expresses themselves so deeply and truly. You can't really hide in VRChat. You just kind of... are going to be seen for who you truly are and you're going to find out what that means to you and that's definitely an idea that i explored within ulterior motives because you have these characters that she meets along the way and each one of them is expressing themselves as one thing but then underneath there's some deeper reason why they're sort of seeking the vices that they are seeking here in VRChat. And that's kind of the inspiration behind the name, you know, because she's connecting with all these characters and along the way, each one kind of has this ulterior motive for why they're seeking this kind of escapism that they're seeking and what they're actually running away from. And I felt like that was my main reason for wanting to tell that story.

[00:19:18.775] Kent Bye: Nice. Well, I think that it really captured a lot of those emotions. And yeah, just like you said, just reflecting all those different dimensions of those universal aspects of the human experience, but in the context of VR. And when I look back to the evolution of VRChat as a medium and some of these machinima types of experiments that have been happening for a long, long time, but and there's the role-playing community. But there's one turning point that I think happened in 2020, August 25, 2020. Kiribiki launched the VR lens sample website on VRChat. I don't know if there was a previous iteration of this that was on Booth. The earliest that I could see it mentioned was back on like September of 2020. But this whole VRC lens seemed to be a pretty key thing to add onto your avatar and start to have all the same types of ways that you could start to mimic actual film cameras. And so that seemed to open up new eras for filmmaking within the context of VRChat. But let me hear some of your reflections on that, but also what you see as some of the other turning points in the evolution of filmmaking and VR.

[00:20:23.891] Ariel Emerald: Yeah, absolutely. So VRC lens is crucial to what we do. Not everybody in the filmmaking community makes use of VRC lens, but for me at least, VRC lens is fundamental to my process because it essentially brings all of the features of a real life camera or DSLR into VRChat, into the virtual space. And it functions as a camera that I can hold. And the great thing about VRC Lens is it's insanely modifiable and it's insanely customizable. And I've worked with people to dig into its inner workings and help me craft the kind of features that I need in order to work with it. Like, for example, I wanted to capture the anamorphic look for my short film, Multiremotives. So I needed to have a feature which would actually anamorphize the bokeh in the background of the shot, which if you don't know, anamorphic lenses create this like oval shaped bokeh in the background, which is very distinctive of that look. It was the only thing I couldn't replicate in post. So that was one modification I was able to make to VRC Lens. There's also different ways that you can use it. Like for example, there's something called VRC Lens OSC, which uses VRC's OSC feature to actually make it so you can control VRC Lens with keyboard commands, which I bind to a game controller. So when I'm filming in VRChat, I'm actually holding a game controller in my hands and I use the buttons on the game controller to control different aspects of VRC lens like zoom and focus, especially manual focus is very important to me using that method. And I think there's just so much depth to what you can achieve visually with VRC lens. And if VRC lens didn't exist, I wouldn't quite be able to do everything that I'd be able to do, but I'd still be making movies with the default camera, which has improved a lot since I started playing. But yeah, I mean, VRC lens is fundamental. As far as the second half of your question, I think you asked about like...

[00:22:24.562] Kent Bye: Yeah, just like that was back in like the fall of 2020 when the VRC lens, at least when I could find the first public mention, it may have been out there on Booth, but it eventually moved from Booth to Gumroad. So there may have been previous iterations that it came out even before then. But you had mentioned that there was the VRCon was an exhibition and that was in December of 2022. And then FIA with the virtual reality show had the virtual reality show FilmFest. on February 25th, 2023. And that was right after that when you started the Discord for the community. But if you look back and look at, you know, obviously Joe Hunting with We Met in Virtual Reality, I think was a big turning point in terms of showing what you can do and documenting the culture within the context of VRChat and have like a Sundance accepted film that then went on to get acquired by HBO. Now it's called Max. But yeah, if there's any other big changes aspect of what you see is now the film scene, if there's other precursors like the role-playing community or any other milestones when it comes to filmmaking within the context of VR.

[00:23:31.385] Ariel Emerald: Yeah, for sure. Well, I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is, you know, why make films in VR, right? And I think everybody has their own reasons. For Joe Hunting, he came in with the documentary aspect, looking to tell a story about VR and about what this space means. And I think fell in love with the space along the way. And, you know, he's a beautiful soul, incredible and passionate mind. And his film, We Met in VR, is really phenomenal. He took a long time to create that film. So a lot of us in VR, we all kind of knew about the film. We knew that it existed, but we didn't actually get to see it. I think a lot of us until it got through the festival circuit. And, you know, even when he was making it, he started making that, of course, before my time in VRChat. I joined VRChat about October 2021. So that was before my time, as was the release of VRC Lens. But it was Joe Hunting releasing that film. And that really is just a huge sort of like... success story in our community as far as like, okay, this is something that can actually be taken seriously. I mean, he took that to Sundance and, you know, he got that distributed on HBO. And that gives a lot of hope, I think, to a lot of people that what we're doing here might be taken seriously. But like... As far as the reason why make films in VR, I mean, some people do it just for fun. Some people do it because they like the VR space and they like to accentuate different aspects of the VR space or because they want to accentuate their own kind of character. I think in VR, there's a lot of people that... really have built up this character about themselves with their avatar or their personality. And they want to sort of heroize themselves with movies and stuff like that. But there's other people that come into it and they want to capture the ways that other pieces of media made them feel. I mean, you just have this sort of anarchic bunch of creators doing whatever they feel like with the camera and using the resources that we have here to do that. And so you get a lot of different things. for me it's definitely all about how i've just really always wanted to pursue a career in filmmaking and i never really felt like i had the resources to be able to do that and so that's what my way into this has been it's all about been me trying to capture the way that i wanted to make films in real life just seeing vr i guess And yeah, like you said, the virtual reality show film festivals were a lot of all of that came together, I think, because you had some really incredible films by Sonny had a movie in there. I think, I believe Evan Floydian had a movie in there. But then at the same time, you also had something like Altered Evil and Training Fangs and their King of the Hill comedy project. which just exemplifies the ridiculousness of VRChat because you have this copyrighted piece of media, the King of the Hill, but they're using it to tell this ridiculous comedy story about Hank Hill, the character from that exploring VRChat. And that one, I've never seen anybody watch that and not be in tears from laughing by the end of it. And, you know, that was shown at that festival. And I think that that moment really like inspired a lot of us in the filmmaking scene to get our act together and, and start doing more with our stuff. And Film Festival started to take off a little bit more after that, for sure. And it really feels like we genuinely have an actual community now, which is really cool. I mean, it's essentially like what we're doing is kind of on a really, really small scale. It's like major Hollywood virtual filmmaking techniques that they do on movies like Avatar and whatnot in terms of virtual tracking like that. But it's being made by just such a ragtag bunch of people that are putting together You know, just like, you know, you have the resources that you need are just equipment and hardware that everyone already has. And so people are taking advantage of that to just chase down whatever ideas they have, whatever story ideas come to mind that you wouldn't necessarily be able to do if you had money. And that opens up a lot of possibilities, I think, for sure.

[00:27:37.967] Kent Bye: Yeah, after the virtual reality show Film Fest, February 2023, on the next day, you made a tweet on Twitter or a post on X, as it's now called. And you said, anybody who has ever wanted to make a movie, be in a movie, make music for movies, make sets for movies, et cetera, now is the time. VRChat is the place. Come and get involved. We need your talent to make this community grow. So it sounded like that was a real catalyzing moment, led to the forming of the Discord of the VRChat filmmakers. So maybe just flesh that out a little bit, like what happened from that event into how that came about.

[00:28:11.676] Ariel Emerald: Absolutely. Yeah. That was, yeah. Well, you know, Fia has such a large following and such a significant presence here in the VR space, especially as a, someone like you, someone who documents, someone who studies this sort of culture of VR chat and all that and makes videos about it. So it was really cool and significant to be featured on that. And they ran a very professional event that really felt like a proper sort of film exhibition. And, um, After that, that brought a lot of us together, but in a way it had to do a lot with me wanting to catalyze that as something to develop the community and me really sort of finding my place as a community leader, which I had never really been before. I'm still figuring out how to do it, but I just thought like, you know, this is the time to jump on this and actually sort of build this collaborative community. And that was something that was very, very important to me from the start is it has to be collaborative and non-competitive. When I made the Discord, the very first rule that I put on the list of rules in the Discord was this is a competition-free environment. And I really stand by that. I feel like we can lift each other up and help each other and support each other and develop this art form and make it something bigger than what it is. I mean, theoretically, like this VR stuff has the potential to be something that grows a lot. And then you'll have a whole lot more people existing in this virtual space, possibly. And by that time, there will be some kind of film industry, you know, in terms of what people are just making films that are related to that virtual space. And that's kind of what we're pioneering right now. And I was like, this is kind of the moment when the watershed moment when that's going to start. And so I really wanted to bring everyone together. And Konga Luwu and Gab Jenkins, two other filmmakers in the scene, felt very similar to me. And they're both trusted friends of mine. So they were the natural choices to work with on getting that set up. And over time, we've all gotten very busy and haven't been able to sort of curate that community as much as we could or put together events for that community as much as we would like to. But there's been different times when one of us will gain a lot more motivation to start doing events and stuff like that. And it's really been crazy to see how much that community has grown over the past couple of years since the creation of that Discord. And it's really cool to see people who have little to no experience in filmmaking come in and just start doing things. And they don't necessarily have the best plan for how they're going to do it, but then they pull off something really unique or incredible. Or even VRChat films that aren't super dedicated to very high quality filmmaking still really interest me because you get to see just this raw outsider artist of filmmaking. I mean, that's actually a really good... way of putting it is that you get a lot of sort of outsider artists in the world of filmmaking who have not really studied film or don't know much about film. And a lot of them are even inspired by things like video games or anime or comics or whatever, but then they come in and they make these really interesting films. I mean, one example you have like, Dee Ghostly, who just released his film, Where Withered Flowers Grow, which won the Best Short Film of VR this year at Raindance Immersive. And he had no previous film experience, but he just happened to be connected to this community. And he had a lot of friends in the Metacosm Studios. That's another thing that would be worth talking about. It's just, I'm not as well informed about the history of Metacosm Studios, but that's definitely something that existed that gave a lot of people sort of inspiration to believe that they can make movies, including people like Ghostly, but When we created the film community, it was my goal. I just wanted like everybody, everybody that has any kind of film connection to be in this Discord. And so I reached out to my friends at Metacosm Studios. I reached out to everybody who had had their films exhibited at one of the two major film festivals that had just happened. I reached out to Joe Hunting. I reached out to people that aren't necessarily connected to the VRChat film community, but are involved more so in the sort of real life film production worlds. There's a couple of folks with significant roles in that world who are in our Discord as well. Just anybody that I knew that had any kind of connection to filmmaking, because I just wanted to build this sort of collaborative space where we could all work together and stuff like that. Yeah. I hope I answered your question.

[00:32:45.752] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, the Metacosm Studios, I noticed that they were involved with organizing the VR film festival at VRCon on December 17th, 2022. And when I looked at their YouTube, they had at the time like Into the Metaverse, which I remember seeing like a trailer for. It sounds like they may still be working on it. I don't know if it's still in production, but it's like a nearly two hour narrative film that they've been working on.

[00:33:09.053] Ariel Emerald: I am not well informed enough to say when that project will be released. I have a lot of good friends that are working on it that are telling me that they are not totally sure when it will be released either. But we'll see. We'll see. I mean, I think that really showed a lot of people that you can make movies in VR. And I think the existence of Metacosm Studios itself kind of inspired a lot of people. So some people might have been really inspired by Joe Hunting and his work. But I think most people just kind of Like for me, the fact that Metacosm Studios existed kind of clued me into the fact that this is a thing people do, that you can make movies here. But I never really connected with them or knew much about them until this one day. And I should talk about this because it's a really good story. It was Raindance 2022. And Joe Haunting was there, and he was doing a Q&A for his film, We Met in Virtual Reality. And I attended that Q&A because I had been wanting to reach out to him about doing an interview. because I just watched the film and I loved it. And I had so many questions I wanted to ask him. So I emailed him about interviewing him for a video and he never responded because he's just very busy with the success of that film, I'm assuming. But he did this Q and A at Rain Dance 2022 and I decided to attend, see if I could talk to him. And the minute he sees me, he's just like, oh, Ariel, I got your email. You know, it was like the warmest welcome I could have possibly received. And then he told me he'd just seen my film rematch and loved it. And I was starstruck a little bit to hear that. But then on top of that, it was also the day that I met the Metacosm Studios team for the first time. And because a lot of them attended that as well. And then that day, literally the Metacosm folks, they had to leave that event early because they were getting ready for a shoot that night. And then later on, I was speaking to one of my friends, Shotgun Envy, and she was saying that she was going to be involved in that shoot later. And I was like, can you like get me into that? And she was like, oh, I don't know. I'm not sure if I can. And then like a few hours later, she messages me, you're in, join on me. And I ended up sneaking my way into this Metacosm Studios shoot. But once I was on set, the director, Konga Luwu, he saw me and just instantly said, hey, you want to be an extra? and gave me something to do. And so it was all in this one day that I met Showhunting, met the Metacosm Studios staff, and then participated as an extra on set on one of their shoots for the first time. And that was such a thrilling day in my life that I'll remember forever because of just how much it felt like I was being welcomed and brought into this world, this community.

[00:35:54.002] Kent Bye: Very cool. I have a good meeting Joe hunting story too, because back at Rain Dance 2020, I was on the jury for, I think it was Best VR Chat World or one of the categories I was a jury on. And Joe was on the jury as well as... Mike Salmon, also known as Mingle Bird, who is now like the curator for the VRChat Worlds Gallery for Venice, who is really involved with helping to discover new VRChat Worlds to be featured at the Venice Film Festival. But we ended up spending five hours in the devouring because... That was the experience and Joe had already been through it. So thankfully he was able to help guide us through, but that was quite a bonding experience to go through five hours of this horror experience within VRChat. But yeah, both Mike and Joe have continued to do some really amazing stuff within the context of helping to facilitate different communities within the context of VRChat. But if we go back to 2022, where Joe Hunting's We Met in Virtual Reality premiered at Sundance on January 21st, 2022, where I did an interview with him for that launch and had a chance to get an early look. And then that December 17th, it was a VRCon film festival where around 30 of these films were being featured. Right. And then there was the Virtual Reality Film Fest that was on February 25th, 2023, which was featuring around 14 films. So that time period seems like there was a real inflection point where a lot of this stuff started to really take off.

[00:37:16.186] Ariel Emerald: Yeah, totally. It's interesting for me because I kind of came into it when a lot of this stuff had already started getting going. I didn't see, for example, the first or second VRCon film festivals. I think there were two of them. Joe Hunting was the organizer of one of them. And then the one that I was able to participate in was organized Metacosm Studios. And that was like, you said December 2022, right? And then the next year in February 2023 was the TVRS Film Festival. So it's interesting because there was some crossover between the two of them. There were some films that were at the VRCon Fest and then those films also appeared at the TVRS Festival Festival. And, yeah, Joe's film released around that time as well. And I have to say, Joe, he could have... I really respect this man for a lot of reasons. His humility is incredible, but he really could have just taken his success from We Met in VR and then gone off and done some other thing and been like, okay, I'm going to use this success to go... make some film somewhere else, make some documentary and kind of leave the VR community behind now that I've told their story. But he didn't. And he chooses to stay in this VR world. And his next project, he's actually filming in VR again. And he's working with a lot of us here in the community. And also he's gone out of his way to really support VRChat Films at Raindance Immersive. And I really think that Rainnets Immersive is such a huge, huge thing for a lot of us in VRChat because it's just such an incredible space for creators, especially this past year, just seeing all of my most talented creator friends be able to shine at Rainnets Immersive. give a lot of credit to Joe and also Maria, obviously, for helping to make that a space for us. And Joe really made that his mission to sort of represent VRChat Films at Reign Dance Immersive. And he's really done a lot to support us here. And it comes back to what I said, like, what's the benefit? Why are we doing this? Like, what are we going to gain out of this? Like, is this just for fun? Are we just in this video game, this silly video game pointing cameras at each other? Or is this going to become... something more. And I think the reason behind that is it's just the fact that there's limitless potential and a whole lot of just creative people connected to each other in this space that like you have a lot of creative people and it's not just creative people that are coming in here to create, but it's also creative people that are coming in here to exist. and to enjoy their time and make friends and like party and also create. And I think that's why having these film festivals has been such a huge thing for our community because, you know, you gain the interest not just of people that might be interested in film made in VR, you gain the interest of this whole community of people that are existing here in VRChat. So there's kind of two worlds in that sense. You have the VRChat community community itself, and then you have this sort of broader world outside of VRChat. And I have to think about both of those separately, but simultaneously. When I make my films, I want to make films that will appeal to the VRChat community specifically, but I also want to make films that will appeal to the outside community as well. I would say that TVRS, for example, that was a festival that really connected with the VRChat community because FIA has such a presence there. And so at the TVRS festival, that was when a lot of people really became aware of the idea that we make films here in VRChat. And then we started to gain a lot of traction within the VRChat community. But I wouldn't say that there was as much outside appeal or outside connection, whereas compared to something like Raindance Immersive, which the Raindance Immersive in 2023 later that year was the first one that was able to showcase films made in VRChat. And that's when I feel like there's a lot more outside connection being made and a lot more of like this is something that we can take seriously. This is something that we can use as an actual filmmaking tool. And not only that, but it's a film school. It's a community-based film school where everybody's kind of able to go out and experiment and do whatever they want. So 233 was very big for that reason because you had those two And then there was a few other moments in between events that we threw together, meetings that we had with our community and stuff like that. But you saw a lot of people pushing the boundaries there. That's also when Kong Oluwu started his new studio, Studio Penrose. And then Portal Media, they got off to their start there. So yeah, Portal Media's film, What If Life Was a Fever Dream, was a real standout at the TVRS Festival. So, you know, you're starting to see a lot of people kind of build their brands, build their studios with Studio Penrose emerging, Metacosm continuing to create stuff that they were making, Portal Media, you know, my own sort of studio, Archangel Film, started to gain some traction that year. And Renance really sealed the deal on that. And I have to give so much credit to Joe for that, for giving us that space in Renance.

[00:42:39.588] Kent Bye: I did want to ask a question around documentary, you know, nonfiction versus the more narrative fiction. And I wanted to read this quote from William Uricchio, who was a part of the MIT open doc lab, and then co-wrote a book called collective wisdom, co-creating media for equity and justice. And he, He had this quote in there that really stuck out to me and I wanted to read it. He said, nonfiction filmmakers have often been at the forefront of innovation with emerging technology. More than 90% of films copyrighted in the first decade of cinema were documentaries. Some of the first color films, the first sound films, the first uses of portable synchronous sound technologies were documentary. So too when cameras came off the tripods and documentarians literally took the technology and ran with it. They followed life as it unfolded in front of the moving camera. That quote has always stuck to me, that documentary as a form is really at the forefront of exploring the limits of new technologies. And I think the fact that we met in virtual reality, getting selected to Sundance and also distributed by a major distributor and available for people to stream on HBO slash Max, it speaks to how documentaries end up being at the forefront of translating what's happening in a certain scene individually. And then figuring out all the different technologies and workflows to actually bring these stories to life with the format of film and cinema. So I'd love to hear some of your reflections on that, because I know if I look back at your own films, a lot of the stuff that you're doing is both kind of capturing what's happening in front of you. And you have like little cinema verite moments where maybe you hear a bit of dialogue, but then you go back to kind of like showing different B-roll and you know, kind of some pure montage sequences of events that happened that were much more in the documentary vein. And then eventually you get more into the narrative components, but I'd love to hear some of your reflections on this pathway from the nonfiction into the fiction.

[00:44:27.003] Ariel Emerald: Absolutely. Well, VRChat is just such an interesting space on its own that I think that is such an attraction to people that they want, that they really are excited by the concept of documentary. Like talking to the average VR chatter, a lot of them are really excited by the concept of documentaries about the space because you don't... I don't feel like you hear a lot of people being hyped about documentaries outside of VRChat.

[00:44:51.821] Kent Bye: Well, I happen to be a huge documentary nerd, so there is... Oh, yes. There's certainly... Actually, just to butt in, just to defend the honor of documentaries, because documentaries, again, have always been at the forefront of innovation. But in terms of storytelling, I feel like Sundance Film Festival ends up kicking off the season for... Films that may end up at the Oscars, but like John Sloss and cinematic media ended up, it was cheaper to produce sometimes, or at least the return would be greater because there's still a huge audience for documentaries that are on the streaming services before the streaming services. It was a lot harder for documentaries to get out there. So I would say there's actually like a huge market for documentaries, but I still think especially nowadays.

[00:45:34.987] Ariel Emerald: Yeah.

[00:45:35.307] Kent Bye: So anyway, I just wanted to butt in and say that.

[00:45:37.941] Ariel Emerald: Oh, for sure. Yeah. And I'm a documentary nerd myself. I grew up watching the Science Channel. I grew up watching Discovery Channel. My childhood TV experiences were not so much with SpongeBob and whatever. They were with Mars and Milky Way and the Sahara and Africa and all these other things of nature and science and the world and all that. So I really, really love that I grew up as a documentary enjoyer, basically, because I just learned so much about the world. In fact, I probably credit that with a lot of my emotional and intellectual maturity that I feel that I have. But at this point, in terms of VRChat, you have a lot of young people, you have a lot of people in this generation, this very immediate generation, that I feel that attention span is something that's quite up for debate these days in terms of how much attention span my generation actually has. So it's not like outside of VRChat, you hear a lot of people saying like, oh, I can't wait for this documentary or hope somebody makes a documentary about this. But then, like you said, sometimes they blow up on streaming and then you get this one documentary that everybody's talking about on streaming because it's just the topic of the week or whatever. But in VRChat especially, you have a lot of people in VRChat that are just really stoked about the idea of documentaries talking about our space, especially because they want more people to know about how great it is. And so a documentary like We Met in VR helps people to realize just how great this VR space is and just how... much potential there is in there and people are really excited about that. You do see a lot of people, a lot of first-time filmmakers making documentaries. In terms of just the people that I know, my friends, I can think of several that have made or attempted serious documentaries on a relatively large scale. Like, for example, we've just had an incredible breakout film by Madame Khanna at this most recent Raindance with her documentary about the New Eden Evergarden community. And then there's my friend Too Easy Dragon, Ari, who created her own documentary about the VR space called Virtually Us, inspired by Joe Hunting in a lot of ways. There's obviously the Resident Advisor documentary. There was a PBS documentary about the club scene. There's a lot of really great documentary pieces that have been made by amateurs or next to amateurs in the VR space, which is really, really cool, really exciting. In addition to, you know, Joe Hunting's, of course, magnificent piece, We Met in VR. And as it comes to my films, With Ulterior Motives, it's definitely a fictional film. I wouldn't call it a documentary, but I see how in a lot of ways it embraces a documentary concept to it. I like the idea that I'm filming in these virtual spaces that are real. I filmed at real club events throughout that entire film. When you see people dancing in the background and vibing out to the music, they are actual club attendees and most of them didn't know that they were being filmed. which, you know, you could raise questions about whether we should have been doing that. But I think that if you're in a public space like a club, there's already a good chance you'll end up on video. I mean, being connected to the club scene on Twitter, on social media, I see myself in videos from clubs all the time. So I feel like that's already a given, already expected. But we ended up just kind of going into these spaces. The reason why I wanted to do that was a few reasons. First of all, It was going to be really, really easy to fill up these club worlds with extras and make them look populated and make them look exciting. But it was also going to add a very realistic element to it. And that was part of my decision to set the film in VRChat. I could have made a club movie that wasn't actually set in VRChat, but... I felt like setting the film in VRChat enabled me to embrace a lot of what makes that space so unique, including just all the crazy avatars and all of the crazy ways that people behave and filming in these real life club events, which for actual events, you know, helped embrace a lot of that. It was fun because I had to like block people to get them out of my way, out of the way of my camera a whole lot. So I developed a pretty large block list of people I never even interacted with just because they were in the way of my camera. But it feels like In some ways that there's a documentary aspect to that, not necessarily, I think, because of the filming in the actual club spaces, but more so in terms of the ideas and the storytelling elements that I'm talking about in that film. Because you have various characters that explore a lot of different aspects of life in VR chat. And that was something I really wanted to talk about. So you can show people ulterior motives, I think, who don't know much about VRChat or about the VRChat club scene, and they can sort of embrace the ideas within it in the same way that they would embrace them in a documentary. And there's a fictional story. There's a character story that guides that film. But I think a lot of people that have watched the film that are my friends who play VRChat have said they found it to be really, really relatable and that they really connected with a lot of what happened to the main character and all of that. So yeah, it's kind of an emotional fictional story, but I think it really guides the audience through in a lot of ways, a nonfiction perspective about VRChat. And I have worked with documentary myself. I actually filmed a short documentary, which I ended up not releasing for a few different reasons and then i filmed non-fiction sort of club videos and some advertisements and also just sort of goofing around with my friends i filmed videos like that like that new year's video that i talked about was me just capturing my my friend group on that new year's night which i thought was really cool I think as I continue to make films in VRChat, I'll be straying probably further from nonfiction, but at the same time, I think that fictionalizing things that are commonalities in VRChat is also something I might continue to explore.

[00:51:39.966] Kent Bye: Yeah, I really appreciated all the ways that you were documenting different aspects of VRChat, even to the point where you're showing some of the user interface, which usually you don't see in videos just because it doesn't show up and you kind of have to go out of your way to have some of those different elements. But I appreciated that authenticity in that respect. I do want to ask about this other piece that you have on your channel, which was titled The Peacekeeping Mission, where you're documenting your journey to MAGFest 2023. It sounds like that you had met a lot of people in the context of VRChat. We talked earlier about how VRChat really helped you to overcome elements of social anxiety. And so I'm just wondering if you maybe comment on what was it like for you to actually go out to some of these physical events and maybe do things that would have been a lot harder for you to do without all of your experience that you gained and overcoming different aspects of social anxiety through the context of VR.

[00:52:33.765] Ariel Emerald: Oh yeah, absolutely. That's interesting that you bring that up because that was kind of just me goofing around with my camera and having fun filming. I mean, in many ways, I have a desire to be as much of an IRL, real life filmmaker as I am in VR and I have some nice camera equipment. And so it's fun for me to sort of take that out and go and and use it and when i went out to magfest i ended up just by happenstance filming a lot of footage on that camera and just capturing a lot of that whole meeting and that was actually a really great time in terms of vr chat history not so much in the filmmaking community but in the club scene that was a really notable moment in terms of just a lot of clubs seeing people meeting up at magfest and just kind of randomly spontaneously it had to do with 2TD, who's the big mind behind Shelter, had a set there at the festival. And so a bunch of people were going to go and see him perform at the festival. But then that kept piling on and piling on. More people eventually started showing up until we had this really big community of VRChat folks that were all attending that festival. I had not really met a whole lot of people from VR in real life before, but I was invited to attend that by my friend Sushi Ferret, who I mentioned before. And she got me into her hotel room, which had three other folks in there. And we, in that hotel room, that crappy little tiny hotel room, we all bonded really deeply and formed kind of a family there, which we all still... try to spend time together whenever we can and support each other. But that whole event was really great because it was the first time that I had really connected with a lot of VRChat people. And it was so great because you would just go to, they had the VRChat portal, you know, they're the screen, which is a portal into the virtual world. And then there was a camera so they could see us and we could interact with them. They couldn't really hear us, but we could hold up signs and stuff to show what we wanted to say. And it was so great because there was always VR chatters hanging out around the portal. So you would just go up and see somebody that you've never met before and just be like, oh, hey, you play VR chat? Yeah. And then instantly hug. you instantly hug because you already have something so deep that connects you that you don't have with like 90% of people in the world. And so, you know, I met a whole lot of people from VRChat that I'd never even really interacted with in the game because when you're in VRChat, in terms of what you actually have in common with somebody, you have in common with literally everybody you see that you play VRChat. But when you go to a real life event like that, the number of people that you have that in common with is a lot smaller. And so the people that play VRChat really found each other and bonded fast to each other and did a lot of cool and fun things together. And that became kind of a hub that people have been deciding to continue going back to. So the following years, MAGFest was also another big hub for VRChat people to meet up. And in terms of really big VRChat meetups, I think the furry community probably is on top of that in terms of just having these huge ass meetups for furries from VRChat to come and meet up with one another. But in terms of the club scene, which is more the people that I'm connected with, the people that I've come to know, it's basically you have that and then you have ShelterCon and then you have, and those are the main events within America. And there's maybe a couple other events outside of America, but those are the big ones at this point within America is ShelterCon and MAGFest in which I've had the, great fortune to be able to attend both of those.

[00:56:17.029] Kent Bye: Nice. Okay. Well, that gives a good overview of that blending of realities, as it were. And yeah, I agree that the furries have definitely been at the forefront with virality, with having these huge conferences with over 21,000 people attending, and then also the physical gatherings, blending of these realities. I did want to ask one other follow-up question in terms of some of the VR... filmmaking community. And then I want to dive into the like crazy music video that was just featured at rain dance. But, um, a couple of things that I noticed is that there's a couple of like collectives, like the moonshot VR producing these little profiles. And I noticed that you had some participation in some of those videos, but also there's a, a new like television station as it were, or at least a channel where it's featuring a lot of these. So C 10 24. So maybe you could talk about some of these community efforts, both moonshot VR and the C 10 24. Yeah.

[00:57:08.914] Ariel Emerald: I would love to talk about Scene 1024. First of all, a brief note on Moonshot. Moonshot was a project started by my friend Shotgun Envy. And she was looking for videographers at the time to help promote events and do other little video works. And she brought me on very quickly and gave me a lot of my first sort of work doing commissions in VRChat. And so I did a documentary about Felix Young, who would then go on to star in my film, promotional videos for her events. But I don't know if she's still doing very much at this point, but Envy is definitely still out there doing cool stuff. But as for C1024, Construct 1024, Channel 1024 is a really exciting new project, which is very much in the works. And it's something that we're still developing. I am technically the program director at C1024. I have jumped on board to help out the founder, Roll the Red, who is a pretty well-known creator in the VRChat space. And we are working together to sort of develop something really foundational and really exciting, which is a 24-7 television station within VRChat, which will serve as a place for creators to express their content. And we really want to focus on having it be a space for VRChat creators, but really it's a space for any kind of VRChat video content that people will find interesting. And so entertainment shows, movies, interviews, documentaries, promotional content, communities advertising themselves, creators advertising themselves, because I think a lot of people want that kind of a space. I mean, I don't think people want necessarily outside advertisements in VRChat so much, but within VRChat, within that community, people want a space to find and discover other creators and people want a space to promote themselves promote themselves and their creations as well and we want to do that in a way that gives people a space in a way that's entertaining and exciting and the thing about c1024 our hope is that someday it will be accessible to the average vr chat user and the majority of vr chat users so Earlier I mentioned public worlds and the difficulty of moving from the public world universe into the more connected sort of friend universe. Because really the public worlds are so, so much bigger than the rest of your chat. There's just a vast sort of swath of this game that just gets stuck and lost in public worlds and isn't really connected into society. the more avid creator space. So our goal is that someday we will be able to have C1024 playing throughout public worlds in a way that enables the average VRChat user to sort of see this creator space and get plugged into a lot of the communities or creative communities that are happening and find their way into a more engaged and active place in the VRChat community and maybe into a better social environment as well. In addition to just providing entertainment and enjoyable connection to the VR world, to everybody who plays the game. I think people really enjoy chilling out and watching the station while just hanging out with their friends or something like that. I'm really excited about C1024 because I think it'll connect the VRChat community in a really foundational and new way. It's going to take a lot of work to build and it's going to take a lot of people to build. So we're really in this stage of actively looking for people to come help us out on staff, as well as we need to gather a lot of video submissions in order to build our launch slate of content. And that's where we're at right now. My main role right now is to find and build that launch content and gather as much video content as I possibly can. So that's kind of happening in the background. as we're preparing to get this channel going and preparing to get a launch. But once it does launch, I'm really hopeful that this will help unite the VRChat community in a really unprecedented way and grow not just the community, but also get more people interested in the VRChat creator space. Because one thing that's always interested me about the VRChat creator space is everything mentioned it before, but it's the fact that you don't just have creators coming in to create, and that's all they're doing here. I mean, the majority of people that create in the VRChat space are people that exist here as well. And this kind of space attracts those kinds of minds that like to come into this virtual construct and very directly see their creations come to life right in front of them. And not only that, but those people want to hang out at parties. They want to make friends. They're all getting very connected and a lot closer to one another and, you know, having relationships, having all this kind of stuff and just getting very connected. And then everything starts to happen just so much faster because it's like you can teleport, right? So you can teleport to wherever you want to be, any friend you want to see at any time. And because all these people are getting so connected and teleporting around and having all these connections that are happening so much faster, you get so much innovations in terms of like social spaces, in terms of computer technology, in terms of rendering, in terms of design art. storytelling. These innovations are brewed just by people connecting with each other and becoming friends and developing relationships. And that's what's really incredible with the VR space. If it was just a virtual space to make stuff in, it wouldn't be as exciting as it is now. And that's why I think C1024 is such a great idea. It's because people will want to exist in this space and hang out and relax, you know, Even if they're not hanging out with their friends, they might just want to throw on the headset and chill out and watch C1024 and see more about their communities and creators that they might not know about. Because if you're not really plugged into Twitter or X, as it's called now, you're not really getting a whole lot of that. And that's what really drives me behind their project. So I'm hoping we'll be able to launch C1024 by the end of the year. I'm pretty confident we'll be able to launch it by the end of the year. I'm hoping sooner. I'm hoping we can launch it sooner, but we'll see. There's a lot of work that needs to be done, but really excited about that project.

[01:03:33.854] Kent Bye: Nice, yeah, a couple other things that it reminds me of is that at VRCon, they would have different booths for different communities to show what's happening in their communities, kind of in the style of VCAT, the virtual market where you would, instead of selling avatars, it's more of like just a space for communities to advertise themselves And then I know the New Year's Eve VRChat has been gathering clips to have communities showcase part of what's happening. So I don't know if that was part of the inspiration for what VRChat has been doing for New Year's Eve to kind of show what's happening in the broader context of VRChat.

[01:04:07.213] Ariel Emerald: Definitely. That's one of our biggest inspirations is the VRChat New Year's stream, which is essentially a 24-hour video stream of various video content submitted by VRChat users. And our perspective, our idea for C1024 is it's like that, except it just doesn't stop. It keeps going all the time. And It's also, we're hoping it to be automated, fully automated and community run. So people will be able to submit their own works directly into the Discord server. And then those will be automatically put into our spreadsheet and we have to approve everything that gets onto the channel. But once it goes through the approval process, it'll be automatically put into circulation into the channel's automated player, which will play from a series of YouTube links automatically. And we have a lot of different plans and systems for how to work that. The UI and the system is all being developed and it's quite close to completion. And it's really just a matter of actually finding enough content to launch the channel, which is, we are going, I believe that that is an achievable goal and we are working on that actively right now.

[01:05:18.581] Kent Bye: Very cool. Well, I wanted to dive into this music video, Like Crazy, that you were premiering with TFM Johnny, as well as Lydie and Melody. And so when I look at your previous projects, I feel like there's a lot of documentary montages. Then you start to get into more narrative. And a lot of your pacing of your narratives were a lot slower. Like you just have these long extended durational takes with scenes. that are really driven by like very moody, emotional music diving into inner emotional experiences. And I feel like this is like a complete contrast into like more action films are very fast paced and also a form of storytelling where you're forced to be more poetic in how you're telling the story. Because it's like a music video style rather than your previous work. So I'd love to hear how this project came about and the different things that you were trying to achieve with trying to tell the story through a music video genre.

[01:06:16.974] Ariel Emerald: Absolutely. So yeah, so Johnny approached me shortly after I finished Ulterior Motives and released that and presented me with the idea of collaborating on a music video. And he had a completely different song that he suggested we work on, which was also a collaboration with Lydie and Melody. It was a cover of a Ronnie James Dio track. But we started working on that, but that didn't end up going anywhere for a few different reasons. But around the start of the year, he had this new song, Like Crazy, that he sent me. And I was definitely very inspired by that song. And the thing about the song, Like Crazy, is it has this deep sort of introspective emotional lyrics to it that really tell the story of a character processing his feelings about a relationship with someone else and that's something i can really relate to from an emotional perspective but the cover this really wonderful incredible cover by johnny in instrumentation by lydian melody is so energetic and powerful with these intense guitar solos and really this whole like 80s, 90s metal aesthetic to it. It's got this Van Halen sound almost, and it's really energetic, exciting, and I loved the energy of the track. I loved how hard it hits when some of the guitar solos slam in, and it's really exciting. It's a really exciting song, but that contrasts with the lyrics in a way. except that it doesn't because the emotions being expressed in the lyrics are so emotionally intense. And the instrumentation is really intense as well, but capturing those intense emotions visually in a way that matches with that instrumentation was my biggest challenge on this. And I really wanted to make something that felt like visually it captured the vibe of the song while also telling a story that matched the emotions of the song. And that was something that was really a challenge for me, but I eventually decided to sort of brave my way into sci-fi on this project and try doing some really cool sci-fi visuals for this and try to do something that was very kind of edgy and out there and intense visually. And one inspiration that me and Johnny discussed was Heavy Metal, which I'm not sure if you're aware of that, but it's like a series of comics that were running since the 80s or 90s, I think. And there's been a couple of animated movies that have been made based on this sort of heavy metal universe, the heavy metal franchise. And these comics are known for being these really sort of over-the-top sci-fi action, gore, violence, sex and nudity, kind of teenage boy aesthetic, but they're notable for being a really, really great experimentational playground for comic artists throughout the 80s and 90s. I became familiar with heavy metal because my friend, who's a comic artist, has a great deal of issues as well as the first animated movie. And he's shared all of that with me. And so I was aware of the aesthetic and style of this kind of sci-fi, this kind of like... retro sci-fi aspect as well as there was a lot of retro sci-fi movies that really inspired me working on this project because they kind of felt like they captured that kind of sound which i would argue that there's definitely kind of a 90s 80s 90s sound to this song that I really felt shines through. So yeah, I guess that was my first decision was to go full sci-fi with it, but I needed to find a character story that actually matched. That was the really difficult part because I really had to dig in. I didn't want to half-ass the character story. I knew I wanted to do something cool in terms of sci-fi and I developed very early on the idea of doing this like Resend sort of space dogfight that was crazy out there, like complicated compared to anything I'd ever done before. But I didn't want to sacrifice the character's story. So I really dug deep into Johnny's own personal story as well as my own and really studied how to tell the story that related to both of our own personal journeys. Because I feel like what I've learned from Ulterior Motives and my other projects is trying to craft a story that really resonates and trying to craft a story that really leaves a huge impact on the audience. It's really founded in how much I can be personally connected to that story as a writer and how much of myself really shines through in that. So yes, I found a story that I think really really shines through in terms of different elements of my own personal journey and Johnny's own personal journey. And yeah, it took a long time for me to really decode all of that. And I would say I didn't even really have the ending clearly in mind until I was nearly almost done shooting the project. But keeping that in mind while also developing that sci-fi aspect of it was really essential to making that project something that I'm as proud of as I am.

[01:11:28.735] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's a super ambitious project that had a lot of people involved. And as we started this conversation where you wanted to get into filmmaking in the context of VR because you didn't really have the resources of working with other people. And there was a lot of collaborators that you had on this project, which was fantastic. Really great to see both in the credits but also in the Raindance Q&A where a lot of them came up on stage as well. One thing that I would comment on in terms of the genre of science fiction is that sometimes the logic of the world of a sci-fi world is something that is something where there's just a lot of confusion normally within sci-fi. And part of that confusion is like, oh, discovering what is the rules of this new world that I don't quite understand. And so I think there was like ways that you can be really abstract and poetic and it's just like sci-fi, but there was certain aspects of the narrative part where I wasn't quite sure what the relationship between these two people were. As I read the log line, it says a disillusioned space pilot reminisces about a fateful encounter that still haunts him to this day. No matter how far you fly, you can't escape from the demons of the past. Now, if I were to watch that film, I don't think I would have been able to come up with that as the log line in terms of, okay, he's a space pilot and he's disillusioned in this fateful encounter. Like maybe you just elaborate on the relationship between these two people, because it was something that as I watched it, I was still kind of unclear as to what the catalyzing moment between these two characters were and what was it about it that was haunting to him.

[01:12:55.475] Ariel Emerald: Well, that means that maybe I could have done a better job, I guess, in terms of telling that story within the video. But at the same time, it's a music video, so it's allowed to be a bit more impressionistic, I feel, with how he told that story. But I did work hard to try to make it so that the story could be clearly told a little bit. But it's possible that there's just so much going on in that music video that it didn't all fully come through. But... Yeah, I guess I had this sort of story that... So first of all, the world. I mean, as you mentioned, a lot of sci-fi really depends on how real the world feels and the logic that's put into the sort of world and how that makes sense. And that was something I found myself having to think about and plan out in a way that was true and genuine without being excessively complicated because I only have a few minutes to tell this story in a music video. So I guess what I boil it down to is that it's very solar system bound. It's not like he's going off to other galaxies and whatnot. The only planets that you see within the film are Earth and Mars and Jupiter. I'm very inspired by the TV show The Expanse, which is a really wonderful TV show that tells a really engaging sci-fi story that takes place, at least for the start of the show, entirely within the solar system. as humanity has just started to colonize the outer planets. And so I guess I was kind of along the lines of thinking that this story would be bound within the confines of the solar system in terms of what Johnny explores. And then I guess it's implied that he... It's supposed to be that he works in space and he has taken some job out in space where he flies... a spaceship around possibly as a freighter or as a defense for freighters or something like that to ship cargo. It's not really clear and I found myself getting really stuck on that particular aspect of why is he out in space and how do I show that and finding that a point of difficulty because it was important to the story, but not really interesting to show in a music video. So I had to sort of find a way to demonstrate what his life at the moment currently is, even though it's a music video and I'm trying to keep it visually interesting. But With regards to the character story, I tried to differentiate different scenes throughout the music video and using color grading and film grain to sort of identify which ones took place in the past and which ones took place in the sort of modern era within the music video. So as it starts off, as the music video starts off, you can see him, Johnny's character, meeting Melody's character as she's performing in a bar somewhere on Earth. And then He sort of meets her and then there's a jump cut to sometime in the future where she's become now a famous pop star and he's kind of isolated and cut off away from her working in space and sees that he can't really escape her because he sees that even out in space people are like, watching her music video and and people are like she she kind of has this fame that's like haunting him and like chasing after him or whatever and um so it's like in the past it's it doesn't really the music video doesn't really show the moment which they separated but The implication there is that he has unresolved feelings related to this person because she either left him or he left her. The way I see it is he had a relationship with her that could have become something more, but then he left her and ended up being very isolated. out there in space with his job that he has. And so over the course of the music video, there's a lot of setup trying to show that and show how he feels about her, his unresolved feelings. There's a dream sequence, I think, which isn't necessarily 100% true to life, but it really demonstrates his unresolved feelings for her. There's flashbacks to the time that they were together. And then there's this video call, which is a moment where he speaks to her or where she's like speaking to him. There would be a time delay since he's out in space, so he wouldn't be able to directly respond. But there's this sort of video call where she's sort of talking to him and he's watching her and he's like kind of still got this connection to her that he feels strongly about. And then Eventually at that point is where I think he sort of makes the jump to wanting to face these feelings directly. And there's a sort of a montage where he's got this sort of holographic apparition of her, which is sort of haunting him and like... representing these unresolved feelings that he can't escape from. And he's like eventually getting onto the spaceship and boarding and just trying to get back to Earth and actually reconnect with her and address these feelings for once and for all. And at that point, it gets highly metaphorical, but he ends up being attacked by a spaceship which is piloted by this holographic sort of representation of his unresolved feelings for her. And at that point, there's the dogfight sequence, which I really tried to show just how the dogfight sequence shows him overcoming this sort of apathy and trying to just head-on attack this fictionalized version of her that exists within his mind and eventually return to Earth so that he can connect with the real thing the real person and engage with those feelings directly and in the end this was the part that was so difficult for me to decide what happens but in the end i decided it made the most sense if he just couldn't if there just wasn't really a true connection there and he just couldn't really bring himself to like you know, there's a sense that the two of them stay next to each other on the couch at the end of the music video. And there's maybe this feel that there could be intimacy, but there just is no intimacy. The door for that is just not there. And so he leaves and eventually goes back to the spot where they were in the woods, where they were on a date in the flashback. And then he's alone and just kind of represents moving on from that time in his life and that particular connection, I think.

[01:19:36.792] Kent Bye: OK, well, as you were speaking, I rewatched the video and I think I understand a lot of the thrust of it all. And I think where I started to get confused was, well, first of all, I didn't get that they were together and then split up and that she went on to be famous. But as I rewatch it, I see those. But because you're kind of jumping around the timeline as I watch the whole thing, it's sort of like. you're jumping into the past and into the future. And you, like you said, you're using color grading to make those differentiations. The other thing that I thought was confusing was the hologram in terms of like, is he seeing the hologram? Is this part of his imagination? Because, you know, being in VRChat, I actually was at the after party and Lydia and Melody was actually wearing that exact avatar. And so it's like, I know that in the VRChat world, it's someone who's actually puppeteering it. but it was difficult for me because he's doing a video teleconference, but then there's a hologram. And then I was like, well, I don't know in this world if the hologram is actually there, if he's seeing it or, and so, and then the hologram ends up piloting the ship. And so then I was like, well, it seems like that's a actual person, but you know, so it was just sort of, what is the ontological status of this hologram? Is it real? Is it not real? But then in the film, you're, you're kind of doing these poetic metaphoric shifts where sometimes it is real and sometimes it's metaphorical. So I think that's where I got a little bit confused kind of tracking the main thrust of like, okay, what is the exact relationship between these two people after watching it a couple of times? But after you're describing it, I think it's a lot more clear as I was watching it.

[01:21:03.621] Ariel Emerald: I think because it's a music video, I was a lot more open to it being this sort of expressionistic, metaphorical thing rather than so much just like a direct one-to-one story. And I think that my hope at least was that people would just kind of be swept along by the visuals and the emotions that they saw on the screen and that they would feel some connection to sort of the emotional aspect of it, even if the story wasn't necessarily clear, straight from start to finish. It's possible that I just, you know, could have organized or structured it a little bit better. But I guess I'm just sort of, it was a mad dash to the finish line with that one. And I was very much trying to find the best way to tell this story within the time that we had. And there's a lot of very strong visual elements in that story at the very least. And my hope was that that would kind of carry it.

[01:21:58.561] Kent Bye: Yeah, in the moment when I watched it, I was, well, first of all, I love science fiction as a genre. So it was really fun to see some of those type of conceits. Like you're in VR chat exploring like what is like even a more advanced type of interface or interaction that people could have. But also just the scope of the adventure that you took us on throughout the course of this film, really quite impressive in its scope and its ambition. And the color grading is something I also wanted to follow up on just because at the Alter Your Motives Q&A, I feel like you could have given a whole hour lecture just on color grading and your philosophy around color grading. It sounds like something that's a key part of your own creative process. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about your interest in color grading. And TFM Johnny said to me that one of the challenging things about creating films within VRChat is that to try to have the end product, have it not look like it's shot in VRChat. I think it's hard for me to know because I know we're in VRChat watching it and there's still maybe some tells, but I feel like you're on the edge of pushing the aesthetic of trying to create a look and feel that doesn't always look like it's just a straight recording out of VRChat. And I know that the color grading does a lot to help to really shape that look and feel of the pieces that you're filming. So I'd love to hear you elaborate on that.

[01:23:14.358] Ariel Emerald: Absolutely. To be honest, I never really expected to develop such a love for color grading as I have. When I first started making films, I made a real life film in high school and I did color grading on that, but I found it quite frustrating with my sort of cheaper camera that I was using. And I didn't really go into nearly as much depth with the color grading as I do now. But it was around the time that I started making stuff in VRChat. I was also developing my own filmmaking hardware in real life and my own filmmaking experience. And I had just bought a 4K camera with very high dynamic range, very good for color grading. And I was experimenting with that a whole lot. And I ended up getting into film emulation, which is the process of simulating the effects of photochemical film in a digitally filmed project because film has a very distinctive look to it that a lot of filmmakers really love and are really passionate about. But it's super, super expensive and it's just difficult to film with film. It's a complicated process that requires a lot of effort, a very big team and a lot of budget and resources. So digital eliminates a lot of that stuff, digital filmmaking, but people still want that look, that film look that reminds them of their favorite movies. And so there's a lot of different tools out there for film emulation. And there's this one guy named Tom Bowles or Tom Balls. I don't exactly know how to pronounce his name, but he produced these power grades for DaVinci Resolve, which are centered around film emulation, which are not expensive, and he sells them on his website. He has a power grade called CinePrint 16, which I purchased and downloaded and started using. To tell you the truth, actually, I found his channel when I was searching for anamorphic lenses, and I found a couple of videos on his channel. I really love with him using this anamorphic lens combination. I loved it so much that I ended up when I went out and I bought his entire rig. I bought the same adapter. I bought the same taking lens and I didn't buy exactly the same camera, but I bought a camera by the same manufacturer, which had a lot of similar color science to it. And I love that system so much. and I still have that camera and I still have those lenses, although I've since upgraded to a better anamorphic lens. But I also found that he had this film emulation power grade, and I think playing around with his power grades and customizing them and exploring how I could develop them to create different cinematic looks was really exciting for me because I could just go out and film a shot on my 4K camera and then come back home and experiment with his cine print in order to make it look like a real shot. Like the one thing I did was I would take shots from some of my favorite movies, and then I would take footage that I had filmed and try to make it look like that movie in terms of just the color grading. And that was a really informative and interesting experience. And I should mention, he's just released a new power grade called CinePrint 35, which I just purchased yesterday. So his CinePrint 16 power grade was focused on trying to emulate the characteristics of 16 millimeter film, which I of course manipulated and worked with until I felt that I captured a 35 millimeter look with it. But now he's just released his 35 millimeter look, which is a much improved version of what he was working with. So I'm excited to work with that as well. But yeah, coming into VRChat and starting to make films in VRChat, I really felt that I wanted to try to make VRChat footage look like it was not filmed in VRChat and try to make it look as much as possible like it was filmed on real cameras with real lenses. Obviously, that's not fully possible because we're filming with these avatars that are quite comical or in nature or anime designed or something like that. Hyper-realistic designs are not particularly convenient for VR because they require a lot of rendering power, a lot of processing power to not look as good or not look as artistic or as attractive as like anime designed avatars or furry avatars. So you don't see a lot of hyper-realistic avatars in VR, but Aside from that, I still wanted to try to capture as much of a realistic look with my VR shot footage as possible. And part of that is color grading. Another part of it is handheld filming and how I use focal lengths in my handheld filming and trying to capture cinematography that looks and feels like real life cinematography with my filmmaking. I like to shoot handheld for a variety of reasons. I've always liked the handheld look. But I really like the fact that you cannot fake the motion of a human hand. So when you're filming handheld in VRChat, you're capturing this real authentic emotion that comes directly from my hand, directly from my arm, which you cannot fake virtually. And that adds a lot of realism. It grounds it a lot. Helps it feel like it's a real camera in a real space, which it essentially is. It's me in a real simulated space. holding out an actual camera and filming with it. And I think that really helps capture the immersiveness of it. And you might say, oh, if you want to do immersive, then why don't you make 360 films? But I don't think people necessarily want to turn their head while watching a movie. I think that If I can use a 2D frame the same way that filmmakers have used the 2D frame since the beginning of the art form to immerse people in their cinematic worlds, then that's an even greater success to me. And so there's that part of it. And then the color grading is in a lot of ways the cherry on top. But for me, I've just become so in love with the art of color grading because for me, it's like painting. That's where I really get to see the final look of the film come alive in front of me because before the color grading, the footage is this like really gray washed out looking log footage or HLG footage, which we use it in order to capture the maximum amount of color information in the shot. and without anything being compressed in the darker light areas. But it looks really ugly if you're not color grading. And so filming all of that and then going into DaVinci Resolve and color grading the footage and giving it this true look It's really where the most artistic part of the process comes from because I can really dive in and just tweak it exactly as I like to make it look as much like a real movie as I can. And I can see the results happen in front of me in real time and just really see the look of the movie shine and it's so immediate it's such an immediate creative process you know like filming when i'm on set and i'm filming i'm not immediately going to see how that shapes the final project but when i'm color grading is the last step and i'm just developing the actual look of the film it's so immediate that i can just see the film emerging and coming to life before me and that's what's so beautiful and exciting about it it just stimulates the like dopamine hungry parts of my brain. Cause it's like, it just feels so magical to see that come out of something that I created.

[01:30:32.037] Kent Bye: Yeah. And as I look back at your films going all the way back to VRChat New Year's Eve, 2022, you have in the title 16 millimeter. And then the next film you have 35 millimeter 1920 style. I'm assuming what you mean is that it's like a color grading of 16 millimeter. And you started to do this from the very beginning of shooting within the context of VRChat.

[01:30:53.584] Ariel Emerald: Yeah, it's a color grading technique. And for example, for that 16 millimeter, the 1920s one, I just thought like, at that point, I was just playing with looks. I was just trying out different looks that interested me. And at that time, it was like, my friends had been DJing some electro swing, which has this kind of 1920s vibes to it. I mean, it kind of evokes feelings of like the Great Gatsby movie with its like exuberant parties that are from that era and stuff like that, because it's swing music. It's functionally is classic swing music, that style, except it's just accentuated with electronic production. And that was what she was playing at that DJ set. And so I just had the idea to make all the footage black and white and embrace the Academy aspect ratio and try to sort of use that look for that video. And that was a time of experimentation in my early days of making VRChat films because I was just trying a lot of different things and trying a lot of different looks. I really wanted to succeed in bringing out the anamorphic look. And that was a real goal of mine. I've always really loved the anamorphic look. I had to actually develop an anamorphic simulation power grade in DaVinci Resolve from scratch. And I created a custom warp filter that I made in DaVinci Resolve that captures the exact warping and distortion of an anamorphic lens at different focal lengths. And I utilized that extensively in some of my work. And really, you know, I started using that on Rematch, but I really feel that I perfected that for ulterior motives, which I tried to capture that whole film in that sort of anamorphic look, which I've come to really love. And I... have a real anamorphic lens which kind of lives on my camera because i just love that look i love filming an anamorphic i love the way that it captures the sense of like a big hollywood movie but i also kind of love the intimacy of an anamorphic lens i love that it makes the character's face it's just so immediate and it makes them look so intense i feel that an anamorphic lens can really capture the intensity of an actor's performance. And in the future, I hope we have better face tracking and I hope we have better performance capture technology within VRChat to really make the most of that.

[01:33:15.714] Kent Bye: Yeah, I noticed in one of your more recent short films, Don't Let Go, that you start to play a little bit more with the five facial tracking as well as the MetaQuest Pro. But that's one of my general critiques of the types of films I've seen, especially fiction films, is that it's hard to show a lot of emotional expressivity in the context of the face. So it's interesting to see some early prototypes of that, but I still think there's a long way to go to really connect emotionally to the characters unless you're using something that's like animation, that's like separate where you're pushing a button, but to really have the one-to-one translation of the actors and their facial expressions translated into the full fidelity, or at least not necessarily full fidelity, because I'm not talking about photorealism and not to the level of like micro expressions, but at least like have a little bit more of just like beyond the kind of static stone face. So I feel like that's one of the big things that is holding back. Like the dynamic range of emotional expression in the context of VR actors who are able to really embody a character. And you can look at it and say, that's amazing acting because right now it just feels so stilted in a way that it's hard to really achieve that full level of emotional expression.

[01:34:27.270] Ariel Emerald: Yeah, and it's getting better because a lot of people are really embracing the Quest Pro because of the face and eye tracking, and people are starting to really demand that in future VR headsets. That's become a demanded feature of a lot of VRChat players is they're like, I have a big screen beyond, or I have whatever crazy headset, but I don't want to use it because there's enough face tracking. I want to use my Quest Pro instead, you know? And so that's starting to become a more common thing that we're seeing, which is great. Unfortunately for the filming of Light Crazy, Johnny doesn't have one. He doesn't have any setup for face and eye tracking. And that really, I feel like that really hurt us a lot when we were filming because we were trying to capture these complicated emotional scenes and it was like... difficult to do without a more avid face tracking setup. But that short film Don't Let Go was actually just an experiment really dedicated to the focus of can I make a movie that really captures subtle emotions with face and eye tracking? It was kind of a proof of concept because My thought was if this proof of concept is successful, then I would feel confident in being able to make a whole movie with a more subtle emotional dimension using face and eye tracking enabled actors. And that was a really interesting film because from the moment that I decided to do it to completion was about seven days. And we filmed it in one day. And I made a post on Twitter and ended up securing a couple of actors that had face and eye tracking and were eager to take part. And we threw it together in just a really short time. And I wrote a story and then we put that out there. And part of the reason was I was actually trying to meet a deadline for... grant submission because I saw this grant, which was for filmmakers, and it was something about like 10K for a chosen project as a grant. And so I made that film because I wanted to submit it to that and try to get that grant money. And I ended up not getting that. But had I got that money, I would have Been interested in using that to create a feature film or at least just a longer, more substantial film that utilized face tracking extensively because I would be able to fund face tracking headsets for my actors in that film. So it wouldn't matter which actors I use because I'd be able to ship them headsets that actually are face tracking enabled. But in the future, as I embrace more narrative projects again, I'm kind of hoping that I'll be able to work extensively with actors who have face tracking enabled because it really does just make such a difference.

[01:37:13.896] Kent Bye: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's still at the very beginning. So I guess as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what you think the ultimate potential of VR might be and what it might be able to enable.

[01:37:25.851] Ariel Emerald: VR itself or VR filmmaking?

[01:37:28.411] Kent Bye: Yeah, either one, both and or.

[01:37:31.972] Ariel Emerald: I mean, I just watched Ready Player One recently. I watched it when it came out, but I had not watched it since actually getting into VR for myself and coming to exist in this space. And that was really interesting for me to just see. It felt like a very honest and accurate portrayal of a possible future. that we exist in and it's not necessarily a happy future that that movie portrays because the real world in that movie has kind of fallen apart and society is all but collapsed and people are kind of existing within their tiny sort of living spaces and dedicating vast amounts of their lives to this virtual space Whereas within the virtual space, it has not only consumed all of society in terms of entertainment and community and social interaction, and also in some ways labor, but it also, the economy kind of swings around it and things that occur in the virtual space genuinely affect the socioeconomic universe of the world outside it. And I was really interested in Ready Player One, not so much as an action movie or anything like that, but in the way the society that it presents within that film. And so my big thing about VR, the future of VR that I really am excited about is I can go and be anywhere in the world. I can live anywhere in the world. I can go visit my friends or whatever and still be connected to this whole social universe that I spend most of my time in. Like even just this past week, I was in California visiting my friends that I met in VR and I had to attend the Rain Dance Awards ceremony. And I was able to use my friend's VR equipment to attend the renaissance award ceremony and inhabit my avatar the same as I would back home. So it really, I love the creative aspect of the VR community. I love the nonjudgmental expression, personal expression that people have in the VR community. I love the freedom. I love the connection. I love the ability to explore and do things that you wouldn't be able to do in real life. I love all of that. I think it's really special. But I also question how it's going to change. And I question how... VR will change when capital starts to get involved and big sort of enterprise starts to get involved and see the potential that is here and start to want to take it over, which has already kind of been in progress for some time, although it seems that From the sort of software, the social community aspect, the social VR platform aspect side of things, a lot of these other big players are kind of stumbling their way through it because they haven't been in the trenches with us seeing what it's like for real. And so they're kind of stumbling their way through things like Meta Horizons, which is not really meeting the needs of what a lot of avid VR users actually want, but eventually they'll catch on and eventually big money is going to come in. They're going to make this place what they want it to be. And that concerns me greatly because I think that the freedom that we have here so much in VRChat is so fundamental to building this almost utopian community. It's definitely not a utopia. There are a lot of serious problems in VRChat, but it's in a lot of ways, there are a lot of utopian aspects to it. And I think protecting that, preserving that, carrying that forward into future platforms beyond VRChat itself is fundamental. And that's been something that I've started to embody in my work and really care passionately about. It's my main reason for wanting to carry on this work with Channel 1024. and help to promote the creator community and help really drive the creator community in VRChat and help people really see that there's a brighter future. Because I think if there were to be a world of the nature of Ready Player One, where this thing we call the metaverse has embodied such a huge role of function within society so as to be, everything kind of revolves around it. Because within the context of that movie, the creator of that space, a guy named Halliday, his rules, his game world holds true no matter what anybody else tries, how anybody else tries to manipulate it. And you have a lot of big money, big corporations coming in trying to manipulate it, but they can't because his sort of universe stays true to itself and i feel that if we have this sort of decentralized open source universe that is by the people for the people of vr we can build this kind of new society I mean, who knows if it'll ever have as much impact on the real world as within that film. But at the very least, it's a refuge. It's a home for those of us that don't have a home somewhere else. And it is absolutely worth protecting and worth fighting for. And I've started to really become driven by my desire to fight for that. i don't think i'm going to leave behind vr i would like to find my way into a real life filmmaking space as well but i don't think i'm ever going to leave behind vr in my process and in my life in my social universe as well and in terms of vr filmmaking it's my great honor to support and uphold uplift the vr filmmaking community really it keeps me humble to uplift my peers in the vr filmmaking community and to build a new universe, because especially in the VR filmmaking community, we have the power to be the face of all this. We have the power to be the face of VR and show people from the inside what it feels like to be in here, which was another thing that I tried to show in Ulterior Motives. We have the power to be the voices. Joe Hunting, his film, We Met in VR, probably did more for social VR. as a whole than a whole lot of other projects because it just has such a wide reaching appeal. It got on HBO. It's such an easily digestible look into the life of a VRChat user. And that kind of thing is really just the beginning as the way I see it. And so it's my great honor to uphold this VR filmmaking community and try to push it forward and keep this sort of VR space in my heart and holding it high and protecting it and lionizing as much as I can into the future, because I feel that it could reach the potential of representing even a societal shift in terms of how people connect, how people interact, how people create together, how people help each other and take care of each other and find themselves and be true to themselves.

[01:44:34.297] Kent Bye: Nice. Beautifully said. And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?

[01:44:42.041] Ariel Emerald: Um, I just want to say, I think this space is defined by people more so than anything else. The most important technology that we have in the XR space is people and looking out for each other, taking care of each other, lifting each other up. And that's the best thing we have. There's no one technology I think that is more important than the people that make that technology possible.

[01:45:12.523] Kent Bye: Nice. Well, Ariel, I really appreciate you coming in to talk a little bit more about your own journey and process of making films in VR. I think you're capturing a lot of really interesting intersections between both your documentary work and nonfiction things that you've been doing within VRChat, but also the fiction stories that you're starting to tell and really pushing forward the types of genres and ways to tell stories within the context of VR. And also just to really help to support the community as it's still in its nascent phases of other filmmakers and video makers, content creators that are getting into using VR as a medium, using the VR medium to be able to use another medium of the 2D filmmaking and all the different affordances of cinema and storytelling and all the different genres associated with that. So yeah, it's a really interesting intersection to see how those two worlds are coming together and really appreciate your helping to illuminate all that's going on in that space. So thanks a lot for joining me here on the podcast.

[01:46:06.214] Ariel Emerald: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It's been a good time.

[01:46:09.676] Kent Bye: So that was Ariel Emerald. She's a VR filmmaker who had a short film that was featured last year at Rain Dance Immersive 2023 called Alterio Motos, and this year had a music video called Like Crazy. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, Well, it was super fascinating just to hear more about Ariel's journey into VR and how she was suffering from a lot of social anxiety and had a situation where she didn't have a lot of friends within her peer group and virtual reality opened up a whole new world where she was able to explore different elements of the clubbing scene and ultimately have the resources and the context to be able to actually start producing films. She always wanted to be a filmmaker, but Had all these social anxiety and other financial resources blocks. You know, you need a lot of money or resources to do the types of films, hire actors and go to locations. In the context of virtual reality, you have this resource of people from around the world and also all these virtual locations. And she's been able to really cultivate and develop her filmmaking skills within the context of VR. Starting with a lot of like more documentary nonfiction elements and now moving more and more into the process of telling fiction stories. But this kind of interesting blend where Altaria Motives actually was being shot in the context of the clubbing scene within VRChat. You know, within VRChat, you can dial down all the different audio so you can be in a world and not even hear what's happening in the world. club around you but you can also like dial down all the voices and you can just basically turn anything into a set and so there's a lot of really interesting anthropological cultural documentations of elements of the clubbing scene but in this take of ulterior motives it's much more focused on this personal story of trying to overcome these social anxieties as well as to find real deep connection within the context of vr I also personally really resonate with some of the different moments in the film of this kind of like social awkwardness that I personally feel, I think just not only in physical reality, but also in virtual reality, especially within the context of virtual worlds. I think I actually might feel a little bit more comfortable in physical reality, but maybe that's just because I've been able to use the podcast as a proxy for me to kind of navigate these social situations and to have these really deep dive conversations that I like to have that it's It can be difficult sometimes to just dump into like a super deep dive topic in a context where the default is sticking to more superficial or surface level conversations. But there's a lot of other elements of how virtual reality has been able to help people overcome different aspects of their own social anxieties. So something that personally I'm very interested in exploring for myself, inspired by a lot of the different themes that Ariel is talking about here and featuring in her film, Altaria Motives. Another takeaway that I have from talking to Ariel is just how ambitious this film of like crazy was because it is trying to actually put together lots of different genres and constraints and limitations with the medium of VR. You know, you're talking about like, it's a science fiction context with some of the logic of the world and world building that in the context of music video, which is very abbreviated with super fast cuts, then sometimes it's difficult to really establish like, What is this world that we're in? What is the logic? What are the rules of this world of sci-fi? So blending sci-fi with music video presents itself with some of these additional challenges, but it allows for this kind of innovation of how do people communicate and what are the jobs and how does fame work within these virtual worlds? And also like some traditional like action movie sequences that are in this piece as well. So there's a lot of super ambitious things that you could really only do in VR. And so at the core, I think the story is like a story of lost love. And there's some other aspects of like from rags to riches where the Lydian melody character is starting in the club scene and eventually become super famous. Although I think it's a little bit unclear as like, how do you depict fame within the context of these virtual worlds? And then also it's using this kind of nonlinear timeline that is using color grading to give some subtle cues as to where we're at in the timeline. But I feel like part of the core of the story is a story of lost love and relationship wasn't clear to me because you start off seeing him looking at her from a distance and then they meet, but then it kind of cuts into a dream sequence where she's alone and then it you get some flashbacks where they're together, but then, and then at the end, he ends up not being with her. And so, you know, the full aspects of their relationship are a little bit unclear and we're in a science fiction world. And so it's also wasn't clear to me, like, what is he doing in these spaceships? Is he like a billionaire? Is this flying around or. It turns out that it's his job, but what does his job entail? So there's these types of expectations that we have in the context of physical reality, but then when you have virtual characters within these virtual worlds, then what is the logic of the world and what are our expectations for what is what? Because you can basically do anything within these virtual contexts, then what are the constraints in terms of what are we expecting in the context of these genres and these stories? So there's a lot of different threads that were being tied together in the context of the piece. And yeah, it's super ambitious overall. And I think for me, I'm really also taking away that when you have virtual reality as a medium, you can do these types of infinite potential types of stories and to try to rein it in to really focus on, okay, what is the core of what is the most important to the essence of the story that's being told? So I think that's just one of the challenges of VR filmmaking. Yeah. And very much looking forward to where Ariel takes us in the future, because I feel like this is like a stepping stone. It felt like this is a type of piece that needed like a short film or even like a movie length in terms of the scope and ambition of the different types of like elements of the story. Yeah, I feel like there's a lot of really interesting ideas to be fleshed out in this. How do you work with existing genres and then translate them into VR? And I think that's, we're at the very early phases of like seeing how these translations work. And I think part of genres is that genre allows you to have a set of expectations and shortcuts that you can use. And within the music video, there's just a lot of poetic interpretations that you can really experiment with that. So it's quite interesting to see what's happening within the music video world. format to see okay what works what doesn't work in the context of storytelling now we can like spread this out to like short film and other long form pieces of content that give a little bit more spaciousness to really fully develop these more complicated aspects of the genre and storytelling within the vr So very much looking forward to see where this goes in the future. The very ambitious idea of the C1024 as a video channel inspired by near Z VR chat puts together this whole epic live stream that's go like for 24 hours featuring a lot of different communities throughout VR chat. And so taking that idea and spreading it out into like a 24 seven network that's just running all these different videos that are highlighting what's happening in the context of virtual culture in VR chat. So that's all I have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a, this is a part of podcast. And so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.

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